What a disappointment Stet: An Editor's Life turned out to be! I was so enchanted by Diana Athill's voice that I quit reading it a few pages in, to save for later; I wanted to enjoy anticipating reading a book I knew I would love, by an author I knew I would fall in love with.
Now that I have indulged myself and read the book, I do love Diana Athill. I knew we were kindred spirits when she wrote on page 6:
Although for all my life I have been much nearer poor than rich, I have inherited a symptom of richness: I have a strong propensity for idleness. Somewhere within me lurks an unregenerate creature which feels that money ought to fall from the sky, like rain. Should it fail to do so--too bad. Like a farmer enduring drought one would get by somehow, or go under, which would be unpleasant but not so unpleasant as having blighted one's days by bothering about money. Naturally I knew that one did in fact have to bother about money, and to some extent I did so, but only to the least possible extent. This meant that although I never went so far as to choose to do nothing, I did find it almost impossible to do anything I didn't want to do. Whether it was 'cannot' or 'will not' I don't know; it felt like 'cannot'; and the things I could not do included many of the things a publisher had to do.
That's how I've always felt about money, too, though in my case that feeling that it should fall from the sky is accompanied by anxiety that it won't, and I'm actually quite good at "bothering about money." Not at making it, you understand. But at keeping track of it and making plans for it and deciding where it should go and whatnot.
Athill can also speak some charming yet pithy truths. Here she is writing about a book of short stories she accepted for publication and edited early in her career. This is a long quote; you really need the description of the book to get the point she makes in the second paragraph:
These were surreal stories in which characters who assumed you knew more about them than you did moved through strange places, such as a busy sea-port which was nowhere near the sea, or a village in which everyone was old and silent except foolish laughter, and which vanished the morning after the traveller had been benighted in it. Everything in these stories was described with a meticulous sobriety and precision, which gave them the concentrated reality of dreams. Perhaps they were allegories--but of what? (...)I would soon find such fantasies a waste of time--of my time anyway--but then, in addition to liking the sobriety and precision of the style, I felt the pull of mystification: 'I can't understand this--probably, being beyond me, it is very special.' This common response to not seeing the point of something has a rather touching humility, but that doesn't save it--or so I now believe--from being a betrayal of intelligence which has allowed a good deal of junk to masquerade as art.
It is precisely because I love Diana Athill's tone and forthrightness that the book disappoints. Within pages, she has sublimated herself, and most of the book tells the story of Andre Deutsch, the founder of the publishing firm she was a part of. She appears to have spent her entire career in his shadow, and she continues to place herself there in what ought to be, to my mind, a book about her. It doesn't help that he is thoroughly unlikable. She goes on to devote the second half of the book to chapters on specific writers she worked with; after being completely demoralized by the tale of Jean Rhys' horrible life, and realizing I didn't know any of the other authors Athill was going to write about, I gave up on the book.
Athill says she wrote the book because she "imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it" (page 5). But she effaces herself so completely that I am afraid it is not her memory that she is preserving. Too bad; I would have liked to know her better.
Posted by Su Penn at December 11, 2003 09:10 PM | TrackBack